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For all the turns in U.S. policy during the nearly four years of the war in Ukraine—from Joe Biden’s “as long as it takes” to Donald Trump’s “you don’t have the cards”—the fundamental nature of the conflict has remained remarkably stable. Russia has insisted on limiting, if not negating, Ukraine’s sovereignty, and Vladimir Putin has long believed that he is just around the corner from convincing Ukraine’s Western backers that this is the only sensible outcome. Ukraine, meanwhile, has held out for security guarantees from the West, so that any end to the fighting would be durable, and not merely a pause that leaves the country in a perpetual state of vulnerability, awaiting the next invasion.

To date, the requirements of each side have been anathema to the other. Since Trump’s reëlection, delegations have gathered in Washington, Kyiv, Paris, and Riyadh, but the old logic held. The war ground on. Putin continued to believe that Russia could squelch Ukraine’s will to fight and eventually the West would tire of serving as a backstop; Zelensky was ready for compromise but not capitulation.

Earlier this month, reports emerged of a twenty-eight-point peace plan shepherded into existence by Trump’s envoy and old friend Steve Witkoff. The plan called for Ukraine to withdraw entirely from the Donbas, parts of which it still controls; to unequivocally give up the prospect of joining NATO; and for NATO to agree not to send troops there. Kirill Dmitriev, the head of Russia’s sovereign-wealth fund, and Yuri Ushakov, a top foreign-policy aide to Putin, were reportedly heavily involved in negotiating the proposal. Bloomberg published a leaked phone call between them, in which Dmitriev says, “We’ll just make this paper from our position,” and, even if White House officials don’t copy it exactly, “at least it’ll be as close to it as possible.” According to another recording obtained by Bloomberg, Witkoff, in turn, offered advice to Ushakov, telling him that Putin should compliment Trump for ending the war in Gaza and say that he respects that the U.S. President is “a man of peace.”

The initiative felt slapdash, and open to divergent interpretations. Many of the thornier details that would need to be hashed out for lasting peace were left unaddressed. The proposal called for Trump to chair a “Peace Council”—modelled after the agreement that ended the war in Gaza in September—but how would such a council function once Trump left office? Or how would the U.S. insure, for example, that Russia was duly enacting educational programs that foster “understanding and tolerance of different cultures”? But, somehow, these ambiguities also seemed to upset the status quo. Soon, the largest question hovering over the document was: Could it actually lead to peace?

The Kremlin is cautious: it views the original twenty-eight points as an opening gambit, a basis from which it could push its advantage. “No document has come as close to a full accounting of Russian interests and priorities,” a source in Moscow foreign-policy circles told me. “But it’s also clear these points can be edited, be rethought, or disappear—or new ones can be added.”

Indeed, on November 24th, Ukrainian officials announced that, after meeting with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other U.S. officials, in Geneva, they had come up with their own, nineteen-point plan. In the new draft, Zelensky said, “many of the right elements have been taken into account.”

The next day, Trump announced that Witkoff would travel to Moscow, and Dan Driscoll, the Secretary of the Army, would fly to Kyiv. “There are only a few remaining points of disagreement,” Trump said. But, heading into the Thanksgiving holiday, there are now essentially two proposals: a Witkoff plan and a Rubio plan. One suits Russia, the other Ukraine. The war’s essential logic has again revealed itself: Moscow won’t accept what Kyiv can stomach.

Throughout Trump’s second term, officials in Kyiv have appeared more willing to make concessions than many observers realize. The country’s situation on the battlefield, while not catastrophic, is unfavorable. Ukraine lacks sufficient numbers of combat-ready infantry, and its drones are not able to fully defend against the Russian onslaught. Russia, though its advances have come at enormous cost to its forces, has achieved an operational momentum that Ukraine has struggled to halt. The situation in the southern front, around Zaporizhzhia, has become as worrying as that in the east, where the battle for the city of Pokrovsk has attracted the most attention. Members of the Ukrainian military are questioning the competency of the top command and the ability of their forces to hold the line. According to Balazs Jarabik, a former European diplomat with extensive connections in Kyiv, security officials have told him that “Armageddon is coming.”

Meanwhile, a corruption scandal unfolded in Kyiv earlier this month in which several top officials, including a longtime Zelensky confidant with interests in the energy and drone sectors, were implicated in a hundred-million-dollar kickback scheme. NABU, an independent anticorruption body that Zelensky had tried but failed to bring under his authority this summer, released a series of incriminating surveillance tapes. In the videos, a suspect complains that his back hurts from carrying so many bags of cash; another says it’s not worth spending the money to protect electrical substations from Russian attack—an infuriating statement in a winter of rolling blackouts. “The scandal shook the state to the core,” Jarabik said. “Everyone was wondering, Who else is on these tapes?” Zelensky, even if not directly involved, was left politically wounded.

The country’s fiscal crisis has also become too acute to ignore. According to estimates by the European Commission, over the next two years Ukraine will need more than a hundred and thirty billion euros to fill holes in its budget. With Trump in the White House, that money is not likely coming from the U.S. In theory, the problem could be solved by an E.U. proposal, which would reportedly provide Ukraine with a hundred and forty billion euros from an even larger sum of frozen Russian assets that are being held in Europe. However, that effort has stalled, and the sums may never reach Ukraine; Belgium, the home of Euroclear, one of the continent’s chief securities depositories, is wary of taking on the sole legal responsibility for the maneuver.

The Kremlin is keenly aware of the pressures that Zelensky and the Ukrainian state are under. If anything, Putin has consistently overestimated this factor. “He thinks for him to get what he wants he just needs to push a bit more,” Tatiana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, told me. “He will squeeze every last drop. Trump will twist Ukraine’s arm or the country will be weakened to the point that it has no choice.”

That’s not to say that Russia is entirely without its own reasons to consider a deal. Oil prices are down. U.S. sanctions imposed in October on Rosneft and Lukoil, two of Russia’s largest oil companies, have eaten into the Kremlin’s most important revenue stream—this month, income from oil-and-gas sales was down about a quarter from a year ago. Importers in India and China, the two most important markets for Russian oil, have scaled down or even cancelled their purchases. Meanwhile, Ukraine has stepped up its campaign of drone strikes on refining and processing facilities inside Russia. As for the military effort, enlistment numbers fell to a two-year low this summer. Some Russian regions, facing local budget crunches, have cut the large signing bonuses they were handing out to new recruits.

Putin’s wager may well be that, however difficult things look for Russia, they are far worse for Ukraine. Convincing him to agree to a peace plan, the Moscow foreign-policy source said, would require not only an assurance that Russia’s priorities would be honored but that they could be fully realized. “The question is how any of this could be transformed into an agreement that will be legally binding,” the source said. Putin won’t be satisfied with anything less than an ironclad, generations-long resolution to what the source called the “Ukrainian question.”

Consider, for example, a central Russian demand: an assurance that Ukraine will not join NATO. How possible, or durable, would that commitment be? The original Witkoff plan dictates that Ukraine should repeal the article in its constitution that calls for NATO membership. Even if Zelensky managed to push through such a change, the Moscow foreign-policy source said, “Ukraine changed its constitution once”—the NATO language was added in 2019—“so why couldn’t they change it again, and again?”

Perhaps NATO itself could take Ukrainian membership off the table. But will all NATO members, including Poland and the Baltic states, which have long feared that they could become the next targets of Russian aggression, agree to such a move? Or maybe the U.S. takes responsibility, and issues a public, indefinite veto on Ukrainian membership. But, from Moscow’s vantage point, Trump is merely a temporary political phenomenon. “We all remember Biden’s policies toward Ukraine and how quick everything he had said ceased to mean anything,” the source said. “So, in three years, Trump himself is gone and who knows?” Putin, like a character in a Greek tragedy, is left chasing a certainty he can never reach.

Stanovaya, at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, repeated a maxim that she has been telling me since the start of Russia’s invasion. The war has gone on far longer than Putin envisioned, and he doesn’t welcome its indefinite continuation as a goal in itself. “It’s not that Putin wants war,” Stanovaya said. “He’d be happy to negotiate. He’s been trying to signal this to Trump all along.” It just has to be entirely on his terms. “Utterly maximalist, as they’re often called,” Stanovaya said. “Or, as Putin thinks of them, basic and self-evident.” ♦

The country is more divided than ever, housing prices have hit an all-time high, and many denizens of the United States of America fantasize about fleeing abroad. But other citizenships aren’t so easy to come by, so I’ve been hard at work mocking up some new domestic states for consideration.

Chermegli
State Bird: The crying skirt steak
State Motto: “Home is where your house is—in Chermegli.”
State Rash: Eczema

Tarpanina
State Flower: Secretary’s bane
State Motto: “Free your skeleton.”
State Secret: He’s harmless, but there is a guy living in that shed.

Bunly
State Nickname: The Creamy Leftovers State
State Motto: “Oops, I left it in Bunly.”
State Gemstone: The humble pebble.

New Xester
State Dish: Tomato thwack
State Motto: “Libertas, tempus solitarium, salsa.” (Translation: “Liberty, alone time, salsa.”)
State Exercise: Fast yoga

Plunket
State Shoe: Management-class loafer
State Motto: “Let’s deal with it later, sweetheart.”
State Hour: Snack time

East Cancrut
State Drug: Benadryl
State Motto: “That’s what she said.”
State Bagel Order: Pumpernickel, double-toasted, with scallion cream cheese, capers, cucumber, and Benadryl.

Yunk
State Color: That green you sometimes see on old pennies
State Motto: “I think you’re on mute.”
State Nightmare: It’s the end-of-semester final exam, and you haven’t attended a single class.

Househonk
State Ointment: Benadryl
State Motto: “Should we get dessert?”
State Website: WebMD

Panini
State Beetle: Yoko
State Motto: “United we stand, divided we sit.”
State Problem: Forgot paper towels.

Dut
State Smell: Burnt hair
State Motto: “Beauty is relative in Dut.”
State Movie: “The Favourite”

From 1999 to 2020, Prune, a thirty-seat restaurant in the East Village, was a New York City institution. Its creator was Gabrielle Hamilton, a woman who (as The New Yorker noted in a review shortly after the restaurant’s opening) “hails from New Jersey but cooks more like a French countrywoman.” That may be true—the restaurant was renowned for, among other things, radishes served with butter and salt. But Hamilton is also a celebrated author. In 2011, she published “Blood, Bones & Butter,” a memoir that is about her chaotic upbringing in rural Pennsylvania as much as it is about her career. Hamilton returned to the subject of her family with “Next of Kin,” which was released earlier this fall. Its characters include her overbearing yet emotionally detached father and her mother, a former ballerina who “taught her everything” she knows “about eating and cooking”—and from whom she was estranged for thirty years. Not long ago, Hamilton joined us to discuss a few of the books that have guided her as a writer. Her remarks have been edited and condensed.

Draft No. 4

by John McPhee

This is McPhee’s guide to writing nonfiction. I don’t know. It might be out of fashion to admire such rigor, but I will still argue for it—I will still argue that you should have one hundred conversations with your editor about a word. Does that make me nostalgic? I feel like recently lots of people around me have been saying that we live in a “post-literate world.” I guess, if that’s true, I’m going to stand on the deck of the Titanic. I just think that we should insist that words matter. It’s important that your facts are checked, and sometimes it’s important for a certain formality to be there on the page. And McPhee, here, really makes the argument for careful, correct craft beautifully. He articulates a truth that isn’t faddish or trendy—a kind of truth that doesn’t expire.

The Writing Life

by Annie Dillard

It took me forever to read Dillard’s breakout book, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” which came out in 1974. But once I got on to her, I couldn’t get away from her. I just think that when you read her writing, you get to witness an astonishing mind at work.

“The Writing Life” is aspirational to me because, among other reasons, Dillard is so fucking funny. She has a profound and self-deprecating humor. Dillard has always felt like a person who can be playful and silly even while being incredibly smart. She reminds me of the people that I met in graduate school who picked up the very difficult language of theory but were so fluent that they could just riff and have fun and play. Meanwhile, back then, I felt like I was barely hanging on to the back of the bus by the fender while it was barrelling ahead.

One Writer’s Beginnings

by Eudora Welty

I bought this book when I was seventeen, and I really admire it. It’s all about how Welty became a writer—or, really, how she started to notice that maybe she had the quality of observation that makes someone a writer. There’s a part where she’s lying on the floor of the dining room of her house, reading. It so mirrored my own existence as a young person. I started to write young, and at the time I was such an observer—a person who noticed all the little sounds in the house, who liked to watch the particles of dust in the shafts of sunlight. It was just so exciting and so satisfying to read a description of a similar experience in Welty’s book and to think, Oh, my god, I’m doing that, too. Maybe I’m a writer, too.

Pig Earth

by John Berger

I love Berger’s “Into Their Labours” series, but I would say that “Pig Earth” is the freaking Bible for me. I always look to this book as a guide for food writing. The way he talks about food is interesting because it’s not really about the food—it’s a way of talking about peasantry, and agricultural labor, and class. For me, even when I’m writing about the tomato salad at such-and-such restaurant or about the cheese at such-and-such cheese store, as I did when I had a column at the Times, it’s important for me to have writing like Berger’s in the back of my mind.

There’s something about food writing—for me, at least—where you can feel like it’s cheap and disposable. It can disappear in two weeks. And to an extent it probably should. But there’s something about Berger’s approach—which is in all of his books—that feels evergreen. He’s always talking about the brandy or the soup or the wine. How a character is collecting walnuts or has a fistful of berries in her hand. Or how the leeks are under a bank of snow outside as someone is lying on their deathbed inside. He makes food a part of life.

Two actors are wriggling across the stage on their bellies. They’re earthworms, or maybe simply brothers, Cricket and Coyote, who want to become earthworms. They’re planning to write a screenplay together, and one suggests making their movie about worms. But “I thought we were writing something about what it means to come from the same root,” the other brother complains. “A movie, a Western, brothers killing men and running amuck in the desert.”

In the oozy, ontologically slapstick “Bad Stars,” written and directed by Amanda Horowitz, and produced in the experimental space the Collapsable Hole in 2025, certain correspondences emerge, particularly if the watcher is familiar with Sam Shepard’s “True West.” In that play, from 1980, two brothers, the wild Lee and the uptight Austin, also bicker about how to write a movie; they also think about “running amuck in the desert.” At the comic coup-de-théâtre climax of “True West,” a drunken Lee smashes a typewriter with a golf club, as Austin gloats over an entire fleet of toasters that he has stolen to prove his macho bonafides. “Macho” is a particularly ticklish idea in the gender-playful “Bad Stars,” and several of the light switches in Cricket and Coyote’s house are rewired toasters. Light changes happen with the occasional metallic ssssh-thunk.

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Shepard—the cowboy laureate of American playwriting, laconic film star, and hallucinatory dismantler of the Western myth—died in 2017, yet he remains a constant presence in the theatre. His works, frequently in revival, can still knock an audience senseless, and they have never stopped calling to a certain type of actor—the mostly straight, mostly white theatre guys with an edge who fell in love with Shepard’s dust-and-whiskey monologues in acting class, but who have since been carried westward to Hollywood. Shepard offers those men a way back to something: at the newly reopened Cherry Lane Theatre downtown, now owned by A24, the very first offering was a “True West” reading with Michael Shannon and Paul Sparks. Ethan Hawke and Paul Dano played “True West” ’s warring brothers on Broadway, in 2018; before them, in 2000, it was Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly; before them, at Steppenwolf in Chicago in 1982, it was John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. Typically, the Shepardian passes from metaphorical father to metaphorical son—say, from Ed Harris in the original “Fool for Love” to Sam Rockwell in the 2015 revival of “Fool for Love”—a family tree that descends from man to man to man.

Lately, though, there has been a flourishing of Shepard adaptations—queer ones, avant-garde ones, political ones—written by women. In addition to Horowitz’s “Bad Stars,” Julia May Jonas premièred a gender-flipped version of “True West” called “Problems Between Sisters” last year in Washington, D.C. This spring in New York, Kallan Dana presented “Lobster,” her memory play about a high-school prodigy who stages Shepard’s folie-à-deux “Cowboy Mouth” in a school trailer. (Dana’s title refers to a peripheral figure in Shepard’s play, written with Patti Smith during their intense affair in 1971, in which a drunk-in-love couple order lobster to their Chelsea Hotel room—delivered by the so-called Lobster Man.)

These women write over and through Shepard, dressing in his clothes, borrowing his plots and his swagger. He wasn’t interested in turning over his work to women—Hawke, who became a friend, once tried to talk him into listening to two actresses reading Lee and Austin, and the playwright scoffed at the idea. Yet in these posthumous rewritings, the Shepardian frisson only intensifies when the playwrights shift away from the straight and narrowly masculine. In “Bad Stars,” the boys’ parents are embodied by a single actor, who plays both sides of a pretty hot love scene; in “Lobster,” the ricocheting teen-age angst in the school trailer—an actor loves her brilliant director, who in turn is obsessed with her ex-girlfriend—has exactly the fizzing hormonal energy of Shepard and Smith in “Cowboy Mouth.” (“Just Kids” indeed.) And the sibling fights in Jonas’s adaptation of “True West” certainly feel more viscerally dangerous when the more violent one is visibly pregnant.

Why so much of this, so suddenly? I assumed that the superflux arose from a kind of dialectical pressure. Maybe, I thought, Shepard’s insistent maleness requires an answering feminization from the universe—tit, as it were, for tat. But in reading Robert M. Dowling’s striking new biography of Shepard, “Coyote,” I came to appreciate that these new writers are excavating currents already buried in Shepard’s bedrock. They aren’t moving in opposition to him, exactly, as much as they are mining his own seam of ambiguity. Shepard had an intuition for gender and identity as a kind of performance, and he was interested in the magical dimensions of imitation. In his incantatory rock-’n-roll drama “The Tooth of Crime,” from 1972, a new rock god, Crow, overthrows the old rock god, Hoss, in ritual battle by learning—and then adopting—the older man’s gait. “I just hope you never see yourself from the outside,” Hoss says, in defeat. “Just a flash of what you’re really like.”

Samuel Shepard Rogers was born in 1943 in Fort Sheridan, Illinois, to Jane and Samuel Rogers, Sr., an army officer who later became a poetry-reading, nature-loving teacher. (By the book’s measure, Shepard was Samuel Rogers IV, though elsewhere—and more evocatively—he’s listed as the seventh, and last, of that name.) The younger Samuel was called Steve, to avoid confusion. The family, which also included two sisters, moved all over before settling in Duarte, California, a valley of seedy American effort at the edge of the Mojave, replete with dusty farms, trucks on blocks, and underwatered avocado orchards. Duarte and its “junk magic” became part of Shepard’s myth, though Dowling—constantly in debunking mode—gently reminds us that he was just as much a child of Bradbury, Duarte’s leafier suburb, where the family lived when he was a teen.

Sam Rogers had been a bomber pilot in the Second World War. According to his son, Rogers instinctively touched a scar on his neck whenever a plane passed over, and Shepard, who took on many of his father’s traits, somehow inherited that terror of planes, too. Much later on, Shepard’s fear of flying led him to a life of long drives, driving from the green hill country in Kentucky, where he bred racehorses, down to Texas, where he sometimes joined in on a cattle drive, and up to New York, where he was still premièring plays until 2014. When Shepard was young, Rogers turned to alcohol—which would become another inheritance. Shepard did some of his cross-country driving drunk, and, when his last, degenerative neurological illness came on him and ruined his hands, he took to tipsily steering with his knees.

In the older Rogers’s case, the alcohol and the trauma worked a deep transformation; he grew paranoid about his family, and would go on furious rampages. Something about his rangy teen-age son particularly antagonized him—“Sam called Steve his nemesis,” Shepard’s mother wrote in her diary. “Sam, Sr. came to regard his only son as female,” Dowling writes, quoting Shepard’s own 1978 writing, buried in the archive at the Harry Ransom Center. His father, Shepard wrote, thought he was “not exactly a woman but of the female persuasion . . . not fruity exactly, but suspicious.” Dowling predicates his book on Shepard’s response—the masculine selves he fashioned around those early wounds.

Dowling is hardly the first to write that Shepard struggled with his inextricable antagonism for his father. You find this Oedipal current in countless profiles and in the criticism; you find it in other biographies, such as Don Shewey’s theatrically savvy “Sam Shepard,” published in 1985, and in Robert Greenfield’s juicy “True West,” from 2023. You find it most in Shepard himself—one of his last plays was “A Particle of Dread (Oedipus Variations).” Dowling’s book doesn’t stop at the men’s “silverback gorilla” fights, though, as the source of pain. He suggests by analysis and anecdote that Shepard’s conscious performance as a “man” to deny his father’s deliberate emasculation of him is the source of his tendency to shape-shift, his fundamental slipperiness.

In 1963, a job with a touring theatre company bore Steve Rogers across the continent to New York: a year later, just twenty years old, he started performing under the stage name Sam Shepard, cutting loose of old associations. In New York, as Sam, he became one of the best-regarded young playwrights of a wild, druggy, ecstatic downtown scene. My favorite parts of “Coyote” take place in the East Village of that time, when a counterculture Shepard, zooted out of his mind on various chemicals, hadn’t yet settled on the clenched jaw and thousand-yard stare of his later, dead-eyed Sam persona.

In the Village, Shepard played in bands; he hung out with his roommate Charles Mingus III and his first serious girlfriend Joyce Aaron, who was his entrée into certain echelons of the avant-garde theatre scene. Tony Barsha called Shepard’s corner of the scene “Macho Americano,” defining it as “a lot of pot, a lot of women.” Love triangles rotated like mandalas—Shepard dated and then married O-Lan Jones while they were both being directed in shows by her ex-boyfriend—and his dramatic work, such as “Icarus’s Mother” (1965) and “La Turista” (1967), reimagined the alienation of the Vietnam War period as dark games, prescient dreams, trippy picnics gone bad. Look him up on YouTube playing drums for the Holy Modal Rounders on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In.” You see a loose, goofy, lissome beanpole in flares, laughing below a shaggy bob.

He may have had a “cowboy mouth,” but he was not playing the cowboy yet. That came later, after he moved back to California in 1974, in his early thirties, carrying his small family out to a ranch, where he could keep ducks and chickens and horses. For Shepard, the West was both the authentic place (meaning a life lived close to the land) and the realm of falsehood (Hollywood). These qualities were tightly bound. His film career kicked off because Terrence Malick saw him mucking out a stall and, impressed, chose him for “Days of Heaven.”

According to Dowling, Shepard knew himself to have a profoundly divided self—abrasive, hot-tempered, prone to crises of “depersonalization.” Shepard wrestled with a sensation of doubleness, this “feeling of separation between my body and ‘me,’ ” he wrote in a letter to the experimental theatre titan Joe Chaikin, a dear friend of his. Dowling considers his masculine playacting a necessary unifying armature, something powerful enough to bind together these splintering parts. And so the snake-hipped, shaggy-haired rock star in fur coats and sunglasses vanished in California. “Shepard had now, knowingly, placed all his fractured selves within a single hardened shell. For him, the identity of the cowboy was the strongest choice—manly, self-assured, tight-lipped, born to nature,” Dowling writes, and Shepard turns to his new (and lasting) costume: the “jeans, scuffed boots, Levi shirts.”

So much of Shepard’s writing was literature “à clef” that Dowling does sometimes take such accounts at their word, leaving us to ferret around in the notes section to figure out where he’s getting his (frequently incredibly personal) information. In one startling case, Dowling uses an oblique piece in Shepard’s collection “Motel Chronicles” as a source for his private feelings about the nascent love affair with Jessica Lange. It’s an amazing bit of detective work—Dowling works out that the story is dated on the day that Shepard would have been driving back from seeing Lange on a movie set in Los Angeles—though it does require us to join Shepard in eliding what is written as fiction as fact.

Shepard wrote and wrote, often writing his mind on his sleeve. His short stories are confessional; so are many of his plays, and certainly several of the screenplays. He and Patti Smith even performed “Cowboy Mouth,” as themselves, on a theatre bill that included his actual wife. (This much candor finally overwhelmed even Shepard: he bugged out after the first performance.) Want to know what it was like for him to grow up with his violent father? Watch his tribute to Eugene O’Neill, “Curse of the Starving Class,” from 1976, which dramatizes the terrifying tantrum-like explosion—his father smashed his way through a door, after Shepard’s mother locked him out—that shaped his jumpy, scalded-cat spirit. This rigorous self-exploration continued past the point that his disease cost him control of his hands. His last writing, a novella called “Spy of the First Person,” written with the assistance of his sisters and daughter, is some of his most beautiful. It narrates the feeling of being observed, from within one’s own dying body.

In 1983, Shepard wrote a letter to his old friend Johnny Dark about guilt, which he called “probably the single most powerful negative influence in my life & it’s ruled me one way or another for years—going back to my early childhood.” Dowling uses that letter, and others like it, to chart Shepard’s recurring themes—guilt over how he smashes up his several families, terror (he makes an interesting aside that all California writers emerge from what Mike Davis called the “ecology of fear,” surrounded as they are by earthquake and fire), the divided self, alcohol, the insoluble paternal relationship. The biography is careful and wise, though it naturally reflects the obsessive qualities of its subject. Questions of identity formation return again and again. Working in Hollywood as an actor is easy money, but it deepens Shepard’s inner fractures around authenticity. “Think about something ELSE, Jesus,” I wrote in the margins, when Shepard, once again, writes Johnny a letter about his drinking, his anger, his arrogance, and being a “long way away from total acceptance.”

Dowling’s persistent strain of analysis, though, is the persona. In 1994, Shepard told Ben Brantley that “I didn’t go out of my way to create an image,” but Dowling’s account rubbishes that denial entirely. He finds intentional image creation everywhere, noting the moments when Shepard shifts among a possible range of pop masculinities—first he tried to be Mick Jagger (Dowling cites a wonderful moment in 1970 when Shepard told the director of the “bourgeois” Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre that “I have to change the image of this fucking place,” while wearing a full-length fur); then it was the Marlboro Man (Dowling finds an unproduced screenplay, “Fractured,” in which the Shepardian main character makes his money modelling for cigarettes). He notes that, at Shepard’s funeral, Lange read from Shepard’s book of short stories “Cruising Paradise”—and the theme is familiar. “Now, repeat. Let’s get it in our head: ‘I am a man, not to be trusted.’ ”

Hawke tells Dowling that there are really two Shepards: the sweet, sober one, who talks about Sophocles, and the snakebit mean one, who comes out when he’s drinking. The division becomes part of the myth. Lange described him as having an “American wildness,” and he, and others who loved him, helped refigure, even rebrand, this divided, sometimes harshly taciturn self as a quintessentially American landscape—part soft prairie, part harsh mountain pass.

That sense of a man as a landscape, to be endured and journeyed through and explored, is what unites all those Shepard adaptations. The women who write through him don’t share his masculinity crisis, rather they seem delighted, or provoked, by the way he responded to it with playacting, costume, poetry, violence. In “Bad Stars,” Horowitz seated a plein-air painter in the corner of the basement space, apparently to paint the scenes as they happen. The cast wriggled on the floor like worms, and I assumed the artist was painting the same thing. At the end of the show, though, the audience is permitted behind the easel, and what I saw there were what seemed like dozens of small sepia landscapes: brown hills against brown skies. What had she been looking at? Somehow, in a way imperceptible to me, she had looked into a narrow basement and seen the whole wide West. ♦

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Photograph by David Heald

Traci Brimhall joins Kevin Young to read “Refrigerator, 1957,” by Thomas Lux, and her own poem “Love Poem Without a Drop of Hyperbole in It.” Brimhall is the author of five poetry collections, including “Love Prodigal” and “Our Lady of the Ruins,” which won the Barnard Women Poets Prize. She has also received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Park Service. She is the poet laureate of Kansas and the 2025 poet-in-residence at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.